History

Key words

Abstract

In old Romanian, veri < lat. velis has various morphological values—predicative verb (veri is, etymologically, the 2nd person singular of the verb a vrea ‘to want’), future auxiliary (veri face ‘you will do’), conjunction or part of a disjunctive conjunction (veri ... veri ‘either ... or’), concessive conjunction (să veri că ‘although’), component of indefinite pronouns (vericine ‘whoever’, vericît ‘no matter how much’, etc.). The formal evolution from the predicative value is the result of a grammaticalization process identified both in Romanian (where it continues a process started in Late Latin) and in other languages, genealogically unrelated, from which Albanian is suggestive for comparison. The purpose of this article is to make an inventory of the formal-functional occurrences of veri, widely attested in old Romanian.